


Borderlands

by OctoWrath



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Deserts, Loki Redemption, M/M, Monsters, Really not as finished as it could be, The Brood, Tony-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 05:41:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5236418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OctoWrath/pseuds/OctoWrath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The saying goes that hell is paved with good intentions. The saying is quite literal for some people. Because it seems like everything with the name Stark printed on it was meant to blow up in Tony's face, and it seems like Loki has a habit of falling after destroying worlds he means to save.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Borderlands

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize utterly that I do not have this finished. I fully intend to complete what has not been written by the end of the month, and please, check out the beautiful artwork done by horns-of-mischief. Seriously. Check out all of her work. It's gorgeous.

Please check out Horns-of-Mischief's gorgeous artwork for this story [here](http://horns-of-mischief.tumblr.com/post/133415481728/part-i-of-my-collaboration-with-octowrath-for) and [here](http://horns-of-mischief.tumblr.com/post/133415541038/part-ii-of-my-collaboration-with-octowrath-for).

* * *

 

Twice he has fallen off this norns-forsaken bridge.

The first time he fell, glistening shards of the Bifrost had plummeted with him, coruscating like faraway stars in the darkness waiting below Asgard. He’d tumbled between realms and realities, dimly echoed dialogue twisting around him while colors pooled into one another, coalescing into a heavy, stifling blanket of languages and sensations that reverberated in his bones. He’d been stretched, unspooled, his skin tight and ill-fitting, _and gods_ his skull had built with pressure until fragile, whittling whispers and susurrus mutters wormed their way into his mind. They told him things, and while Allspeak could not translate what they said into words, meanings and emotions trickled in as though through a sieve.  

Then, a chaotic shifting of sands had sent him dizzily into the farthest reaches of the Yggdrasil, where the Mad Titan had found him and…

It was not an experience he wished to relive, neither the fall nor the finding.

And yet here he was— _again_. Fortunate for him he’d leapt this time, into the tenuous grip of static and twisting location that the freshly resurrected Bifrost had constructed under the hands of a fleeing skrull. Though it had not been Loki who’d summoned it, the portal had contained a thread of direction, _of destination_ , and while he knew not where he was now, he could not think it worse than his first falling.

There was sand beneath him, in his face, hot and coarse, but he took a moment to breathe before lifting his head from the ground. A hoard of the chitauri that had fallen with him lay dead with half-sprawled limbs, a dozen of them mangled and crisp from a wayward strike of lightning Thor had sent their way in attempt to halt their pursuit.

He’d nearly missed being crushed by one of the three Leviathans that had also been caught in the turbulent pull of the Bifrost, leaving him sprawled amongst a graveyard of cooling, armored flesh rolling with sizzling steam. Thor had called out, telling him not to enter the Heimdall’s observatory alone, that it wasn’t _safe_.

Loki hadn’t bothered to look back at him, though he had smiled wryly beneath the hair whipping in his face. 

Thor had learned much in recent time, and yet he still had not noticed that Loki was _always_ alone. And Loki did not play with safety, did not have time for it. It made him wonder once more if his broth…if Thor had really ever known him at all.

He wasn’t sure what he was anymore, whether the crowned prince would welcome Loki as _brother_ anymore than Loki would welcome him in return.  

He supposed it didn’t matter much at the moment.

He groaned and rolled onto his back, sand filtering between his bloodstained clothes. He had leathers and linen, garnished prison garb for the fallen prince. He had not been able to summon his armor, and while he would have assured anyone else that it had been skill, Loki knew, for he would no longer lie, not to himself, that he had luck to thank for not being shot or skewered. 

The sky was an azure, nearly violet hue, and contrasted dramatically with the dunes of sand surrounding him. He sat up, leaning heavily on one hand positioned behind him, and upon further investigation found that the sand might’ve only been half sand, the other half rubble. He let it run through his fingers, considering the chalky residue that coated his palms. If he looked more carefully, he could see tiny fragments of what looked like bone.

His eyes narrowed and he looked up at the sky once more. He knew the realms, all except Helheim, and yet he could not place himself by his surroundings just yet. 

Movement caught his attention. One of the bodies shuddered, gasping with a pained whine.

Loki stood and walked towards the chitauri calmly, picking up a spear as he went. He twirled it in his hand, noting that the charge at the spearhead, most likely like all the others littering the ground, was dead. He stopped at the head of the body just as it turned itself over.

Its thick limbs and pale grey skin had begun to gradient, small, squinting eyes widening, filling with amber iris and slit, snake-like pupils. The skin became a dark shade of green, torso and ears elongating.

Loki easily recognized the shifting appearance of a skrull. 

“Oh, what providence,” Loki greeted blithely. The skrull, whose name he distantly recalled being Char, winced but met his eyes.

“Liesmith,” he coughed, grinning weakly. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yes,” Loki enunciated in a crisp syllable, holding the spear with a bent arm, blade pointed down towards the skrull’s throat. “Fancy that.”

“You know as well as I that there was no denying him.” Char blinked, a dark spool of blood collecting at the corner of his eye from a deep gouge across his brow. “Willingly or no.”

“Considering the score…” Loki trailed, “I can’t say I disagree.” 

“You can hardly fault me, then.”

Loki studied him.

“No, I don’t fault you. No more than I fault myself.”

“Oh good.” He laughed wetly, a pained shudder shaking him. The sand beneath his body was slick with blood.

The skrull closed his eyes. “This is not how I…” he muttered. “On some backwater planet with...” He swallowed. “Better to die by your hand than his, anyway. You know, I don’t know how much of it was the staff’s influence, but I think I might’ve liked you, Liesmith. In another life.”

“In another life,” Loki drawled, “we never would have met.” He drove the spear into his neck, quick and precise. He twisted it viciously, yanked it free, and then drove it once more into the skrull’s skull. The resulting gargle was short lived, and then Char stilled, and was once more just another corpse.

Loki only lingered long enough to check the body for the scepter, but it was not there. He stalked away, a myriad of thoughts and emotions clawing, tangling, trying to choke him. He shoved them down ruthlessly and began the process of checking the rest of the bodies and searching for the jeweled staff that Char had entered the portal with but was now missing from his possession.

Minutes later, after putting one other body to rest, he perched in the shade of a Leviathan while frustratedly concluding that the staff was gone. Lost. Perhaps fallen to some other realm entirely, Loki knew not. He searched the horizon, spotting the blurred edges of a city. The heat made it appear as though it were a hazy dream, looming structures seemingly rippled like an image on water.

He tried once more to grasp his sedir, but it was maddeningly just out of reach. Muted. Drowned out by the sensation of beating wings and the brush of feathers. He cursed and ran a hand through his hair.

And so he was stranded, without a way back.

He took a deep, steadying breath.

The city it was, then.

 

 

 

“ _Ha!_ ”

Tony grinned and pulled the schematics drawer the rest of the way out. Inside were a series of sketches, diagrams, and data sheets paperclipped together, a folder to the side scribbled with the project name and then, on top of it, a big red stamp that read TERMINATED BY ROXXON ENERGY.

Flipping through the material, his interface magnified over keywords. The project had involved a survey of the state’s soil content, along with an experimental program that had hoped to purify contaminated land samples.

He wasn’t really surprised to see the company name on the termination; it explained why it’d taken him this long to uncover the file, and why it had no digital copy besides mere mention of a name. The cover-up hadn’t been particularly elegant, but the think-tank that’d generated the project hadn’t been big or influential enough to drag their heels, so it all wound up buried deep in corporate’s junk drawer.

He stuffed the folder into his backpack, reaching for another drawer when the cottony sensation of a minor glitch paused him in mid-grab. He blinked and flexed his hand, narrowing his eyes as he conducted a quick search through his processes. A few seconds later Extremis pinged that nothing was amiss. He tentatively gripped the drawer’s handle, fingers fluttering.

“Hey, J, where are we with our botanist friend?”

Cool blue toggled his vision before Jarvis’ crisp tone replied. “It seems Dr. Hansen’s tomography findings have determined that two out of the three discovered aquifers have been either contaminated or damaged. The third, however, is accessible. Dr. Hansen has offered her findings as soon as the water analysis is complete .”

“Progress,” he sang off-key. He shrugged the pack back on his shoulder. “Speaking of which, processor output?”

“Output is running at twenty-three percent more efficiency. My mobile systems are running at a significantly cooler temperature.”

“What would you do without me, J?”

“I believe heatstroke would aptly summarize the outcome, which, might I remind you, sir, that your temperature is currently one hundred and two degrees Fahrenheit. Might I suggest taking a rest and hydrating?”

“Eh, I’m just going to take a looksee over the next three floors, then maybe see if this place has a kitchen.” Tony grinned. “Never know, could get lucky. Maybe they still have sugar packets in the breakroom, or, dare I say it, _coffee_.” Of course it would only be instant coffee. Prior to limited resources, Tony hadn’t ingested its chalky texture and burnt taste since grad school, but as it was, it would be his first cup in, what, four years? “I would willingly submit myself to Hammer tech for the rest of my life if I could just have _one cup of coffee_. Well, maybe only a few months,” he amended. “Hm, tough choice, now that I actually think about it.”

“If you say so, sir. Might I then also remind you that hydration is essential, and that one can multitask while doing so.”

Tony unstrapped the canteen at his hip and shook it, judging about how much he had left and how much he could drink while leaving enough for the trip back. Shrugging, he took a swig and savored it. Wearing three layers probably didn’t help with the overheating, even under the shelter of the half-buried building he was in, but it was necessary with the sun as it was. It was either that or the worst sunburn of his life, and you know, Tony could go without legitimate sunstroke and blisters to accompany it, thanks.

The first layer was a simple linen shirt, which typically didn’t see the light of day. The second was a kevlar vest that he begrudgingly traded for a while ago. He had a design that would have wiped the floor with it, because come on, _kevlar?_ But he didn’t have the materials to synthesize it, so _kevlar_ it was. The third layer was a hooded canvas coat, decked with as many pockets as he could reasonably make it. Underneath the coat, a cowl rested across his shoulders and shielded his neck—handy against the sand-pelting winds and shading the lower half of his face.

The atmosphere kind of sucked these days, and while most people avoided being outdoors if they could, it really wasn’t an option for him. The canvas on the coat was lined with a fabric he designed in the early days of the apocalypse, for protection against the horrendously invasive sun. He’d anonymously sent the design to Bruce, hoping that, even if Big Green did figure out who’d sent it, that he’d make good use of the designs anyway.

He did, of course. He’d even made improvements before approaching whoever had the right materials, materials Tony simply didn’t have access to anymore. And even if he had, no one would have wore Stark-issued designs. Not anymore.

When Tony had walked through the streets of New York a year later, face hidden behind his cowl and, at the time, the hood of his newly-purchased coat, he couldn’t help but swallow a bit of bitter pride that’d surfaced when he saw everyone wearing the finished product, material recognizably different from anything else.

Small deeds towards atonement, not that he ever could ever really measure them all up into something resembling redemption.

He looked around in broken drawers and sifted through more rubble throughout the offices, papers and cracked computer screens littering the floors. On the next floor he did wind up happening across a breakroom, a vending machine already smashed open and gutted. He didn’t find any sugar or coffee, but he did nearly cry when he found a packet of cocoa wedged in the back of a drawer.

In the same room he found a door to what might have been a food pantry, and it was while he was considering either jimmying the locked door or bashing it open that he felt it.

The impact of what had to be something huge shook the building’s frame, a rumbling sort of clap in the air echoing between the skeletal buildings, making him start.

“What the hell was that?” he muttered, looking dubiously at all the sand and dust falling from a growing crack in the ceiling. “J?”

“It seems to have originated from a location east of the city, though I cannot determine the cause. The closest readings I have are to that of a sonic boom.”

“I repeat, _what the hell?_ ” He grumbled. “Probability of a swarm?”

“Seventy-four percent.”

“Shit.” He kicked the door.

“I would suggest vacating the area, sir. My readings indicate no life signatures nearby, however there are only three more hours of sunlight remaining, after which the probability of a swarm increases to ninety-two percent.”

“Yeah, yeah. I won’t dick around anymore,” he muttered. As he made his way towards the emergency stairs, he turned towards the far wall and gave a two-fingered salute to the Roxxon logo.

Two floors down Tony realized he should have expected the problem he found there. “Right,” he said, staring at the collapsed stairwell. “Well, who needs stairs anyway?” He exited onto the floor he was on and stopped at one of the already broken windows, looking down at the sandy ground over a dozen stories below him.

Craning his neck to look east, he tried to see if he could see anything that might explain what had caused the quake. He could make out a few dark blips, the heat making their edges fuzzy and indeterminable. The distance he calculated made them pretty damn big—just by looking at them he could imagine them being a whole hell of a lot larger than a city bus.

Right, he was _definitely_ going to check that out as soon as he got out of here. That was technically out of the city, anyway.

He charged up the repulsors in his boots and stepped off the window ledge, sand and debris flying in a mini whirlwind as he set down. He set off at a jog, wishing he could just fly over to his car but knowing that the noise it would make would just draw attention to himself. They didn’t usually come out in the sunlight, but Tony wasn’t going to willingly make himself bait on the off chance that they _did_.

The car was at the edge of the city, parked in a mostly buried garage that had miraculously made it over the years. It had taken him forty minutes to walk to the Roxxon building, unworried about running into anyone in this particular location. Still pretty careless, though. He hadn’t had a run-in with anyone in probably over six months, becoming comfortable in his isolation, and wasn’t that the easiest way to get killed?

He nearly made it back in twenty, having to stop and catch his breath midway and flick up his hood. He drank the last of his water and rubbed his chest.

Reduced lung capacity was a bitch, as usual. He recognized the building ahead of him as the one that’d been adjacent to the garage, nearly sighing with relief.

Only, when he went to take another step forward, a brittle crack and the tense sound of pressure on glass sounded beneath his feet. He froze, looked down in time to see sand rapidly emptying out into whatever the hell he was standing on, and moved to charge up the boots as the area draining widened in accompaniment to the abrasive crunching of glass. _Motherfucking goddamned fucking “Shit!”_

His stomach flipped as he fell through the floor, cursing and just barely engaging his boots. It wasn’t nearly enough in time to spare his foot from catching on the edge of something, sending shockwaves through his leg and causing the thrust sputter out. He was able to minimize impact so that he fell into a hard roll, crashing into tables and chairs before sliding to a stop.

He gasped at the same time Jarvis filtered through his head. “Sir?” The note of concern in his AI’s voice was both impressive and reassuring. Before he answered, he stood up, happy beyond belief that his leg wasn’t fucked and he could still put weight on it. He leaned back, surveying the ray of light filtering in from where he’d fallen, shapes forming in the dark as his sight adjusted from the daylight outside.

When he could finally make out all the signs circling the walls around him, he nearly choked on a gruff laugh. “J, where am I?”

“It would seem that you’ve fallen into the food court at the Mall of America.” Tony breathed heavily, unable to keep from laughing bitterly again. “Electrical output in R-Thruster has been compromised. However, your biofeedback is positive considering you just fell three stories. Congratulations, sir, at once again cheating death. ”

“Well get on your swim trunks and roll out the slip and slide, it’s just fun and games from here on out.” He kicked a chair out of the way and tapped at head. “Map to get me out of this place? I am literally going to be minced meat if I don’t skip town right fucking now.” He gave the darkened storefronts a wary glance and lowered his voice. “Speaking of which, this is the worst possible place for me to be at the moment.”   

“Schematics are online,” Jarvis’ voice helpfully supplied as Tony’s interface gave him directions to the nearest exit. He zoomed out of the mall’s layout and saw that a garage was situated right beside it—which would be where he parked his car. How had he missed falling on his way into the city?

He made sure to keep quiet as he made his way across ridiculously large room, though there wasn’t a lot that could be done about his boots’ effect against the standard tile and grating on the escalator steps, which he took by twos. _Home free, please stay home free_ , he chanted silently, steadily walking faster while keeping his eyes sharp for any movement other than his.

The initial route was collapsed, and it was as he was passing a Piercing Pagoda on his way along the second route that he heard it.

The staccato clacking of several dactyli against tile echoed along the corridor in front of him, the slight swishing ends of a forked, barbed tail visible over the top of one of the sales stalls in the middle of the hallway.

Tony ducked behind the stall beside him, tapping off the light he’d been using to navigate his way in the darkness. The clacking got louder.

He looked around the stall, past some Brookstone massage recliners and a fallen rack of merchandise, to see a maw of insanely large, needle-like teeth attached to the snout of an elongated, leathery head. Tentacles made up the front two legs, the rest otherwise insect-like and sharp. The sleazoid snuffed at the air, exhaling a reverberating chirp that really wasn’t all that different from a katydid, only deeper and more guttural. He grimaced and pulled back to consider his options.

He could probably trick it, create a distraction from the way he’d come, wait for it to pass and book it. He just didn’t know how smart this thing was, or whether he’d have enough time to clear the area before it noticed him. There was a possibility that he could knock it out somehow, maybe with a repulsor or a piece of rubble, maybe a magazine rack, but realistically it’d be the same as just killing it, and if he did that then he’d have the rest of the Brood coming down on him in waves. _Fuck_ hive mentalities.

Before he had to make a decision though, the sound of glass and shattered tile bounced around from the direction of the food court. The thing’s head snapped to attention before it flew, miraculously, past him and around the corner. Tony could hear the mounting sound of more clacking from where it’d disappeared, like dozens of nails tapping in quick succession.

Well, if that wasn’t his cue, he didn’t know what was. The only thing stopping him from making tracks was the sound of a pained yelp, followed by a hoarse shout and the sounds of collateral damage.

What were the chances that someone was in the area, never mind that they’d fallen from the same place he had? Because that sound he’d heard? He’d be damned if it wasn’t exactly just that.

He _could_ be smart and take the luck he’d been given, especially considering the scarcity of it in his life and how, right now, it seemed to be offered to him on a golden platter—and _especially_ considering the total likelihood that going to help who’d ever had fallen would end with him being torn into little, itty-bitty bite-sized Tony pieces.

Or he could hurry up and do what he knew he was going to do anyways, because when was Tony Stark _not_ going to throw caution to the wind in favor of reckless rescues?

He punched the stall’s cabinets in frustration and pulled himself to his feet. “J, don’t be surprised if we need to make a quick getaway. If I can manage to grab our _really_ unlucky friend from his untimely demise, I’ll be bringing one hell of a mall crowd out with us.”

“Of course. As a reminder, the Brood’s most vulnerable locations reside in the humeral plate of the wing joint, as well as the trochanter and the underside of the abdomen. I’ve taken the liberty of powering up your arm repulsors, as well as L-Thruster.” There was a pause before Jarvis concluded with, “You will be incapable of flying out until internal reparations have finished with R-Thrust. Please do be careful.”

“Aren’t I always?” Tony joked.

Jarvis’ voice was dry and weary.“Not especially, sir.”

He ran back, checking his corners so that he didn’t get surprise attacked by one of those things, gripping the railing overlooking the food court as he slammed up against it. Just below him a—school? flock? a swarm?—of sleazoids crowded a figure in dark colors, some skittering out of the way as the figure rolled into a crouch, bracing for impact as a set of jaws came down on him. In some complicated move that reminded Tony a little too much of Natasha, the guy landed on top of one of the creatures and tore back its snout, sliding out of the way just in time to avoid the stinger on its tail.

Tony would have whistled if it wouldn’t have gotten him spotted.  Instead, he glanced at the walls behind him, looking for the fire safety kits that usually hung—ah, there was one. He elbowed the glass casing and nabbed the fire extinguisher inside, flicking off the plastic tab under the nozzle.

He took one last glance down at the situation he was about to insert himself into. Four insectoids still stood, cautiously but still very much aggressively advancing on the figure, while two lay dead. Tony hadn’t seen any weapons on the guy, still didn’t, which meant he’s _killed them with his bare hands._

Material to marvel over later, though, because this guy didn’t exactly look too hot, and the four left were getting uncomfortably close. He took the nozzle in his one hand and pressed his fingers to the trigger. “Wish daddy luck,” he muttered.

“Good luck, sir.”

Then Tony was vaulting himself over the safety railing, falling into a crouch beside the figure and feeling the impact hard in his knees and ankles. The guy beside him startled slightly before Tony pressed the trigger and shot pressurized nitrogen in front of them as a chilled, foamy smokescreen.

He gave the guy a look, grinning despite himself as he lowered his voice to say, “Follow me if you want to live.”

Let it never be said that Tony Stark didn’t take advantage of a perfect moment to say a cheesy one-liner. 

The guy looked dubious but Tony figured that he got the message. Tails became visible and the dark outline of bodies began to emerge from the plume of chemicals, but before they could get close, Tony and the guy were halfway up the stairs. He tossed the extinguisher, shooting it to get the most out of what was left. He didn’t look back to see if the distraction did anything helpful.

They got as far as where Tony had last time before the sleazoids caught up.

The genius fell hard, a tentacle around his foot dragging him back and towards a set of teeth dripping with thick, sticky saliva and a stinger hovering ready to strike. He flipped onto his back, bringing his right arm up just in time to deflect the stinger’s blow. It took only another second and then teeth replaced it, chomping down fruitlessly on the alloyed metal of his prosthetic forearm.

Tony felt sweat at his temple and smiled bitterly. “How’s that taste, asshole?”

Not great, if the enraged screech was anything to go by.

The sleeve on his coat tore, as well as the shirt underneath. He cursed, kicking at the underbelly and readying his flesh and bone hand, equipped with a modified repulsor gauntlet, for a blast to dislodge the thing. 

The end of something slammed into its head instead, giving Tony the leeway to rip his leg out of the tentacle’s grasp and roll out from under 200 pounds of scaled hide.

A dead sleazoid lay a few paces away, looking like its head had been bashed in, skull crumpled like a deflated basketball.

...How?

Tony took a look up at the guy he’d rescued, and who, he realized, just rescued _him_. He held a broken metal pole in a stance that looked practiced, and Tony started wondering a little if he’d even needed saving in the first place.

He shook his head, flexed the fingers on his metal hand to make sure they still worked, and as the guy distracted the sleazoid into a weak position, he jumped onto its back, avoiding the tail and hoping its reflexes were at least a little compromised. He crammed his hand underneath the armored head and against the spinal cord.

The shot was quick, punctuated, and then Tony’s mount was collapsing under lifeless limbs.

The staccato reverberation of more clicking legs and pitched bleating echoed chillingly. More sleazoids. Fantastic.

“So, we need to book it out of here,” he began to say in lieu of an introduction, only to realize the guy had vanished. He would have rolled his eyes if not for the screech greeting him at the end of the hall and the sound of displays being trampled.

Tony booked it.

Later, after the sun had bled like an egg yolk and gave way to a nearly luminescent night sky, he found himself in a fuck all part of the city, farther away from his car because of the ridiculous chase he’d had to give to lose the herd of livid monsters that’d seemed bent on following him to the ends of the earth.

“I am _really_ too old for this crap,” he groused.

He also realized that he was going to have to camp out in the city tonight. Unless he wanted to risk running into more giant alien insects in the dark, which was a chorus of _no_.

He muttered to himself, pushing at a collapsed sign from the entrance to a building. The remaining glass in the windows reflected the myriad of stars in the sky, the moon large and nearly suffocating with its brightness. It kind of completed the whole haunted desolation theme of the ruined streets.

When the sign wouldn’t budge, he slammed his forehead against it and grumbled more aggressively, turning and sliding down to sit with his legs against his chest. Tony hadn’t smoked for at least twenty years, but he could _really_ go for a cigarette right now.

“Sir, I’m picking up on a potential life signature in the area.”

Tony froze. “How many of them?”

“Just one, sir.”

He paused, and then brought up Jarvis’ readings. A few buildings away a significant drop in temperature bloomed into the shape of a person. “Weird.”

“Indeed. It seems to match my recordings of your earlier ‘damsel’, as you so put.”

“Double weird.”

“I would recommend not engaging, but it seems you are already en-route.” If Jarvis had the modulator for it, Tony would have heard an exasperated sigh. “Sir, he seemed quite capable in your previous engagement.”

“Yeah. What’re you getting at?”

“It would be unnecessary to further assist him.”

“Oh, I’m not going to assist. I’m going to ask him how the hell he took out three sleazoids barehanded, and _then_ where he gets off ditching me like that after I went through the trouble of saving his ass.” He troughed through a dune of sand spilling into the building where his readings spiked. The revolving glass doors had been smashed, half filled with debris.

Inside was a lobby, furniture clustered on the opposite side of a front desk, though both were nearly buried in sand. Tony slid his way down from the doors, boots crunching when he started to jogged with his momentum. As he passed, he ran a hand along the backrest of a yellowing couch, feeling a strange, lilting nostalgia for hotels and distant, flashing party lights. He followed the hallways decorated with generic landscape photos hanging askew in cracked frames, soot staining walls like tattooed shadows and bullet holes peppering in clusters around each corner.

He stood in front of the last door on the fourth floor, checking the handle and finding it unsurprisingly locked. It only took him a minute to pick it, the door silent despite its disuse as he pushed it open. He stepped as lightly as he could across the hall foyer, breathing in the heavy, musky air. It felt like swallowing a balloon.

The man from the mall sat in the far corner of the room, beside a full-length window obscured with dust and soot. He sat forward on one knee brought up to his chest, leaning as his other arm grasped at his back. His hair fell across his face, and Tony shivered at a sudden chill that seeped across the room. He blinked, surprised, when he realized he could see his breath.

The sheets from the bed had been torn into strips, some of them crumpled and matted, still slick with blood.

Tony frowned, and a moment later he seriously considered punching himself in the face as he walked over to the bed that nearly shielded the other man from view. At the sound of his steps, the man’s head snapped up, eyes narrowed and focused intently on Tony as he unshouldered his pack and rifled through it.

He made his movements slow and precise, noting that the man coiled tighter and tighter to the point where Tony wondered how his bones hadn’t popped with the strain.

When he withdrew his hand, he held antiseptic spray and a roll of bandage wrap. He inclined his head, and then even slower, he placed the items down on the bed and slid them over. The guy didn’t meet his eyes; instead, he stared at what Tony had given him, face unreadable as Tony took his pack and walked to the other side of the room, in the opposite corner, sat with it between his legs, and waited.

_And might I ask what happened to ‘not assisting’?_ Jarvis said through his link to Extremis. Tony shrugged and leaned back against the wall, getting comfortable.

The man watched him with a guarded, if somewhat puzzled, expression. Still, he didn’t move, so Tony tilted his head back, showing what he could of his throat, and closed his eyes. The memory of a sleazoid’s bashed skull replayed through his mind, but he kept as relaxed as he could, Extremis’ systems running recon while he otherwise seemingly left his defenses open.

He wouldn’t say he dozed, but he did drift a little with some thoughts concerning the obvious void of heat on his scanners emanating from across the room. Tony began playing with the idea that the guy might be a mutant, wondering, if so, why hadn’t he displayed any sort of power while fighting, when he heard the gentle sound of a hand reaching across the mattress and then the clinking shake of the antiseptic can.

He waited till he heard a telling grunt to open an eye, the sight of the man struggling to lift his shirt greeting him as well as a quick glance from a pair of green eyes as Tony cleared his throat. He inclined his head and lifted his metal hand, stilling a wince at the sharp and sudden pain that screamed abruptly from one of his nerve inputs. He wiggled his fingers and then, visibly wincing this time, went through the series of latches to detach the entirety of the forearm from its socket, excepting the port installed into the flesh at the nub of his elbow.

_Sir?_ Came the slightly concerned tone of Jarvis’ voice. _What are you doing?_

“No idea,” he muttered under his breath.

He gently put the arm to the side, and, not unlike approaching an on-the-verge-of-hulking-out Bruce, ah memories, Tony slid across the gritty carpet, only pausing when the guy clenched his fists to knuckle white. Tony sat back, his calves straining with his balance, and waited for the guy to either chill out or give Tony permission to get closer. 

They sat in a stalemate, their eyes not quite focusing on one anothers’ in a tenuous grip of wariness and, well, to be honest, Tony couldn’t get a read on much more than that.

He considered heading back to his corner, maybe just leaving altogether, because the longer Tony waited, the less he was certain about his choice in coming and doing whatever the hell it was he was doing. He briefly understood that it probably had something to do with, ugh, _loneliness_ , because while Jarvis was awesome as shit, he still hadn’t actually been within reaching distance of another person in over eight months, and before his quick trip to New York he’d been— 

Time to snip that line of thought in the bud. Fuck introspection.

Tony froze in his retreat when the humid air suddenly leeched what warmth it had, vacuumed into the space the man occupied.

The guy’s hands fluttered to his back as he visibly attempted to withhold another wince. He was trying to untie whatever binding he’d already done, but with the amount of blood on the floor, Tony would be surprised if he could even feel his fingers.

“I can help,” Tony said. The guy’s eyes snapped back to him, narrow and sharp. “Or I can leave. It’s up to you, but it’s been a long day and I’m not as young and spry as I look.” That got him a scoff, though it sounded like it’d been torn from him. “Shocker, I know. Come on, I know you’re stronger than you look, and if it’s a pride thing, I’m pretty sure we both fell through that glass roof back at the mall. If you won’t tell, I won’t tell. Capiche?”

The guy warred with himself, Tony could tell, until, with an inclination of his head, he nodded in a short, aborted movement. 

Tony shuffled again and sat at the man’s side, crossing his legs and, as gentle as Tony knew how, lifted the hem of the shirt, maneuvering around the leather outerwear, dried blood having made it stiff and probably uncomfortable.

When he lifted the shirt, he grimaced. “You did a shit job at wrapping this.” The frayed strips of bedsheet knotted right across the worst of the puncture, probably an attempt to apply pressure to the wound, but the ending result looked painful and messy. It looked like it’d stopped the bleeding pretty good, though.

He felt more than heard another huff. “And you intend to do better with one arm?” The guy had a smoky voice, honeyed and made elegant by the rounded, crisp accent that Tony couldn’t quite identify.

“I _made_ that arm over there with one arm,” Tony snorted, though he did struggle with the knot for a good minute. “You sure do like to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“You refer to our earlier parting.”

Tony made a face. “Yes, I _refer_ to our _earlier parting_. By the way, this is probably going to sting. A lot.” He sprayed the antiseptic liberally, only a little maliciously joyed when the guy hissed at him.

_Sir, there are a dozen lifeforms heading in your approximate direction. I believe them to be identical to the ones from your earlier chase._

“Shit.”

“They have followed you here,” the guy accused, apparently aware of their encroaching company too.

Tony glared but kept his grip light as he taped the bandage off. “How do you even know that?” he grumbled under his breath. “It’s probably your weirdly frigid body temperature. You know those things see in infrared, right?” He felt the guy tense as Jarvis pinged him an update on their movements.

Tony used the bed to lift himself up, closing his eyes as a thought trolled through his mind and exhausted him even more at its implications. He went to gather his stuff, knowing more than likely what the answer would when he asked,“do you have a car?” 

The guy peered out the window. “I...do not.”

He looked back only as Tony clicked his arm into place. The fingers spasmed for a second, pain lancing up to the back of his neck. As he rolled it, he looked over his shoulder, the stranger finally meeting his eyes for the first time.

Tony raised a brow. “Want a ride?”

 

 

 

They’d gotten to the car and were twenty miles out before Tony finally spoke up.

“You’re welcome, by the way, for the daring rescue I just made on your behalf.”

The guy quirked a brow. He hadn’t bothered to strap in his seat belt; in fact, he looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if the whole layout of the car confused him.

He didn’t seem to want to respond, and if it weren’t for the facial gesture, Tony might’ve thought the guy hadn’t heard him. He wasn’t looking at Tony; instead, he watched the scenery through the window, or lack thereof, eyes narrowing subtly in time with twitching fingers that were poised as if he were playing cat’s cradle. He looked frustrated, almost angry with something.

Tony gave him the only privacy he could and watched the nonexistent road. He wasn’t usually one for extended silences, not even when he was by himself, but the guy kind of seemed like he needed it. Besides, the the socket wired in at his elbow ached. There were little spikes of sporadic pain looping up into his shoulder; the teeth on that sleazoid had definitely tampered with something in his sensory input, and while it wasn’t going to kill him or anything, it was giving him a tension headache. He was okay with some quiet time. He’d gotten used to it over the years, anyway. 

About an hour later, it was broken when a pale fist punched against the glass of his passenger window.

Tony looked warily over at his passenger, who cursed in a language Tony was unfamiliar with. The guy was stewing over something, the guarded expression from the hotel now twisted with frustration. 

“Mind sharing with the class, buttercup?” When the guy still didn’t bother to answer, Tony jumped to the conclusion he was usually left with, and sighed. He figured this might happen. It was usually only a matter of time before people recognized him. He averted his eyes and stared hard at the steering wheel. “Look, I can drop you off at the nearest terminal, if you want, but New York is your best bet if you don’t want to wind up stranded in this sandpit. You’re not gonna get a whole lot of charitable itinerants out here willing to give you a ride for free.” Tony breathed. “And you don’t look like you have a whole lot on you.” 

“New York?” the guy repeated, tone strained. Tony repressed a wince.

“Yeah, look, I know I’m not exactly the most popular person in the world right now, but if you can just hold out until then—”

“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” the guy interrupted in an even tone. He shifted in his seat, and when Tony looked back at him this time, they made eye contact. “But you speak of a city I’ve heard of, in passing.” There was a pause.

When he spoke again, it seemed like he was uttering something painful. “This is Midgard, is it not?”  

_What?_

“Midgard…?” Tony trailed off, digging through the familiarity of the word. “You mean, like world tree Midgard? Norse myth stuff?” But then Tony really _looked_ at the guy—at the strangely-woven material and leather he wore, the lack of any real weapon or pack or _anything_ that would suggest this guy had just been found in a No-Zone city with no real resources in sight, which screamed _stupidly_ _unprepared_. He thought of his accent and the quick, strange fighting style back at the mall, of the sleazoid’s head, crushed as if by super soldier strength—the low body temp. He thought of the strangely soft, pained inquiry he’d just given and the muttered curses in a language that, even if the world had been whole, Tony didn’t recognize—which, admittedly, could have been overlooked if the world _had_ been whole, but _it wasn’t._

_A city I’ve heard of, in passing_. In passing?

“My name is Tony Stark,” Tony admitted in a burst. “What does that mean to you?”

The guy leaned back, the corner of his lip dipping slightly. “Nothing,” he answered. His expression became removed, nearly disinterested. “Why should it? You are mortal—a light that does not linger, a sigh between life and death.” Something on Tony’s face must have said something because the guy asked, slowly, “Should I know it?” 

A strange hollowness lodged itself in Tony’s chest, his passenger’s melodramatic and morose answer aside. He didn’t know how long he sat there, but a dizzying rush of confusion and misplaced, he thought, elation seemed to catch his breath. He cleared his throat before answering.

“If you’re not from around here, then no,” he said, slowly. “And by ‘around here’, I mean Earth, which I guess is your Midgard, which means that you’re from…?” Tony trailed off.

The guy smiled joylessly. “Not from around here.”

A tense silence ensued wherein Tony stared at the guy, waiting for some sort of elaboration. Finally, after an inquiring eyebrow on Tony’s part, he relented.

“I...” he said haltingly. “I stepped through a portal not of my own making. I was...attempting to stop someone from entering it himself.”

“You have got to be shitting me,” Tony said, though without any real inflection. The guy looked kind of offended by his response, so Tony waved a hand. “No, I’m sorry, it’s just—you’re saying that you traveled through a, a what? A portal? You traveled through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge _, via_ _wormhole_.” And the funny thing was, Tony believed him. There wasn’t a single person on Earth who didn’t know Tony Stark’s name, and not a single person would have suffered the pretense of not knowing it.

There might’ve been a time Tony relished that thought.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” Tony continued, “not with the displacement Foster’s been going on about in her publications, and not with all the things popping up in the last decade, not with it getting worse, but, just,” Tony took a deep breath and suddenly grinned, albeit weakly. “What I wouldn’t have given for this to happen back when it really would have meant something to the world.”

The guy gave Tony a long suffering look, as if Tony reeling over this groundbreaking information was tiresome. “So,” Tony tried, coughing into his hand, “you have a name?” When the guy didn’t immediately answer, Tony thought of the word _Midgard_ and laughed. “Don’t tell me it’s Thor, because honestly, you don’t really look like a Thor-kind of guy.”

The guy’s shoulders came forward in a quick jolt of surprised, choked-off laughter that ended in a hiss of pain and a bitter grin. It was in that moment that Tony caught a glimpse of the seat, stained with a handbreadth of what was definitely blood.

“Shit!” Tony almost braked before remembering his passenger’s lack of seatbelt. “You’re still bleeding like crazy. Why didn’t you mention you were still bleeding? I’ve got more stuff in the back, but how bad is it? Because I’m not a doctor—I mean, I have _doctorates_ , but that really isn’t—”

“Do you ever stop talking?” The guy wasn’t quite smiling, but there was a genuine sort of mirth on his face, tone just bordering on mocking. It stalled Tony for a moment, mostly because he wasn’t exactly sure if the question was rhetorical.

“Occasionally,” Tony got out. “But that usually means I’m unconscious. Look, do I need to stop? Because I really don’t think I can handle you bleeding out in my car.” Tony’s face screwed up as he reevaluated those words. “ _Not_ that I want you bleeding _outside_ of the car either, I mean—here.” He started to reach back, hand searching for the extra first aid kit he knew was behind his seat, but the guy laid a hand on his arm.

“Peace,” he said, looking at Tony as if he were a puzzling creature. His posture had relaxed, though Tony had no idea why he seemed a little more at ease. “My flesh is not so fragile, it will heal.” The guy didn’t look totally convinced of himself, so Tony definitely wasn’t, but wasn’t about to motherhen the guy.

“Right,” Tony said. “So what are you, exactly?”

The guy stared ahead, like he was considering something. “I am Loki.”

“The Norse god of mischief?” Tony nearly laughed. He gave the guy a once-over from the corner of his eye. “I have a feeling you’re going to be complicated as shit.”

“That would be one way of putting it,” Loki murmured. He canted his head towards Tony, eyes lowering to his metal arm. “And you, Tony Stark? What would you name yourself?”

Tony immediately thought, _damaged_ , but refrained from admitting _that_ out loud. “Human about covers it,” he said instead, shrugging. “Fragile flesh and all. Though, I would like to point out that I am the one who a) saved your life, and who is b) currently not bleeding profusely all over my car.”

“I hardly needed saving. Was it not you who lay pinned beneath one of those beasts, arm accosted?”

“Why are you suddenly so chatty? Where did this sass come from?” Tony grumbled. “It’s the blood loss, isn’t it? Aren’t gods supposed _not_ bleed? Jesus, you owe me new upholstery.”

 

 

 

Loki rolled his eyes again as Stark offered him an arm out of the vehicle they’d been traveling in. 

“I’ll manage,” he told the shorter man, getting out himself. He felt eerily naked without his armor, even more so without the expanse of fully-functioning sedir.

The wound would not have bled so terribly if not for how deep it had been and if not for his newfound _fragility_.

The time between meeting Stark the first time and meeting him the second had been unbearably enlightening. If he tried too hard to reach his sedir, he found, the Jotun frost from within him reared up to meet him.

The thought had nearly made him damage Stark’s _car_.

Hours had passed since the wound finally clotted, and it seemed, at the very least, his natural ability to heal even without magic had not been tampered with. Already the shredded muscle had recovered.

They’d passed an increasing number of ridges, the tender slopes of mountains lazily ascending, sometimes at half-mast, as if something had come along and knocked them down. Stark explained that much of the geography had altered in recent years, leveling most of what had been a more diverse land, though he had not explained the cause.  It was alongside one of these ridges, nestled in a pocket of land, where it seemed their destination was.

“It was a mill before I had it repurposed into a bunker,” Stark said, leading him towards a rather small building of sturdy stone. “If it weren’t for the mountains, though, I’m pretty sure it would have been leveled.”

They approached a wood-framed door, Loki watching as the man went through the motions of what seemed like a ritual of some sort. He tapped out a sequence on a visual interface that had appeared when they approached, pressing his face forward as something scanned it.

An identification system.

Once the door opened, they were met with a spiral stair, the steps worn blunt and missing patches of stone.

It wasn’t exactly narrow, the descent, nor was the walk long, but the close quarters of it reminded Loki again that he was...not quite trusting this mortal. He might’ve sneered at the thought if it didn’t amuse him so much, if the ache of exhaustion didn’t remind him of his limitations, of where those limitations stemmed, and Norns, how could following this mortal make things possibly worse?

He refrained from using the wall as a crutch, the pain no longer quite so invasive as when he was in the _car_ , though by the time they reached the end he was working to keep his breathing under control. The nearly empty well of his magic left him feeling bereft, like an empty stomach aching for food to fill it, and it joyfully reminded him that he had not truly rested in…

He blinked.

The very notion that he couldn’t remember made the onset of his exhaustion all the more debilitating.

They came to another set of doors, different in appearance and texture from the previous. Expecting another set of motions, Loki was curious to find that, instead, Stark _spoke_ to the door.

“C’mon, J. Open up, daddy’s home.”

And then the door spoke back.

“Voiceprint and passcode recognized: welcome home, sir.”

Loki watched with mild fascination as the doors smoothly slid open, revealing what was, as Stark had said, a bunker.

It was quaint, not small enough to be stifling, though he could see, given an amount of time, how it could be. Each space in the room seemed to account  for something: overhead there were a series of lofts containing, what looked like, supply crates, and to the left it looked like what might be some sort of living area.     

The rest of the room, it seemed, was dedicated to several workstations with technology not dissimilar to what he was familiar with, though confirming it would require a closer look at the interface. A series of screens at a large, rounded desk displayed some sort of activity, their design sleek and simple. Along the far walls there were large devices made of metal, along with several sets of wide drawers.

Stark strode into the room and settled before the desk and its bright screens. Loki followed in after him, feeling rather than seeing the doors close behind him. He took a few steps in, pausing alongside a stack of supplies and watching as Stark dropped the bags he’d been carrying, pulling papers from his bag and distractedly entering something into the devices.

“So what can I offer you, Loki from, I’m going to assume, Asgard? It’s Asgard, isn’t it? Seriously, correct me anytime,” he said without looking up, not noticing when Loki flinched. “Anything relating to medical help seems to be off the table for you. How about water? It’s been recycled a hundred times over, you’ve been warned. What about some freeze dried snacks? We’ve got…” he looked up from his station warily, looking over to a corner of the room. “Chinese, Italian, or blueberries?”

Loki raised an eyebrow.

“Freeze dried?” he asked offhandedly as he took in more of the surroundings. Suddenly, to the back of the bunker, what Loki had initially taken for a pile of metal sprang to life and rolled forward. It had a long appendage that waved as it wheeled quickly up to greet him.

Stark looked at it wryly. “Dummy, Loki. Loki, Dummy.” Loki watched as the device spun in a circle, chirping excitedly. Stark rolled his eyes. "Freeze dried just means it’s been dehydrated. Mostly with the military in mind. It's meant to last for long periods of time without going bad and not take up a lot of space." Stark looked at him, the same wry smile he’d given his machine that seemed more polite than anything bringing out the lines on his face. "It's not very good."

Feeling utterly indifferent and once again hard-pressed not to use the wall as a crutch, the god shrugged. "Both water and your food, regardless of taste, will be fine."

Stark snapped his fingers and the machine stopped in place.“Dummy, give me a hand while I send this message.”

The machine whirred and sped across the room, spending several seconds arranging itself so it could grip the latch on the wall.

“It’s a fridge. Not rocket science,” Stark said without looking up.“Be patient with him. He tries his best, but I wasn’t exactly at _my_ best when I made him.” He paused, seemingly content with what he'd done, before tapping a letter and straightening out, running a hand through his hair. "I was in college, and I might've been a little drunk while writing his code. Probably more than a little drunk. Probably wasted. Okay, okay buddy, that's fine, bring it here."

The device had pulled the door open and was rifling inside. It pulled out a decanter before rolling back and then forward to shut the door.

Both he and Stark watched as it rolled up to Loki and tentatively offered the drink to him.

“How do you control it?” Loki asked as he took the water and unscrewed the top. He gulped gratefully, content with the cool temperature and how it soothed his throat. He glanced down at Stark's machine, then once again over the contents of the room. It seemed much of the room was mechanical in nature, not unlike Nidavellir. He wondered if the rest of this world took after this fashion, or, thinking of Stark's metal arm, whether it was just Stark.

“I programmed him to respond to vocal commands. I also programmed him to have some common sense, but sometimes he just needs a little..."

The device, on its way over to Stark, slammed into the corner of the desk. It looked almost confused, giving a surprised sort of whir, before slamming into it again.

Stark winced. "...Push. C'mon buddy, you're starting to stress me out." Stark gently repositioned it and sighed."So, food. Chinese or Italian? I don’t know why I offered up blueberries before, they’re definitely not on the table."

The question still didn't mean a whole lot to Loki, so with a frown, he picked the former.

“Good choice.” Stark walked over to a box and rummaged through it before retrieving a container. "Only marginally less terrible than the weird faux-pasta." He threw it to Loki.

Loki caught it and turned it over in his hand.

“Um.” Stark looked around, searching for something. “You can sit on the bed, if you want…” he mumbled before scratching his bearded chin. “Hey J. Where's that chair I had?”

“I believe you dismantled it last week, sir, and used it to reinforce the water filter,” the voice from before answered, coming from above, through a system that, Loki theorized, spanned throughout the entirety of the bunker.

“Oh." Stark sighed. He waved Loki towards the bed. “Sorry about the lack of seating. I'm not really a ‘having company over’ kind of guy.”

This bunker had, he observed as he made his way to the bed, not been made for more than one person. One bed. One chair that was now being used elsewhere. The space available could have perhaps provided for more, but was currently occupied by tools and other devices, things Loki would investigate later.

He sat back onto the bed and peeled the container open. As he began to pick at the food inside, tentatively tasting what lay portioned, he found himself wondering how much worse the other offered food could have been given the bland, indiscernible texture and taste of what he was currently ingesting.

What he thought of the food, if it could be called that, must have shown on his face, because Stark began laughing.

“Would you believe me if I told you it’s significantly better than your other option?” he choked out between laughter.

Loki gave him a withering look. “Is this the only...thing you have to eat?” he asked.

“For breakfast, lunch _and_ dinner, seven days a week, approximately fifty-two weeks a year. At least, for the moment.” Stark shrugged and opened one himself, perching on the edge of the desk. “Food’s kind of at an all time low these days, which affects quality in the most disappointing ways.” He took a bite. “See: Mountain House Chicken Teriyaki.” He pointed at the bag in Loki’s hands. “Which is what you’re currently eating.” 

“Due to the soil?” Loki surmised. “Is the entirety of Midgard so ruined as the land I’ve seen?”

“Yeah,” Stark laughed dryly. Loki wondered at the man’s tone, at the near callous edge to the word, but said nothing. “I suppose now’s a good a time as any to say ‘make yourself at home’,” he said. “I can’t really turn the lights off, but I can switch them to Evening. That’s if you want to sleep, which I’m imagining is a thing considering how much _blood you lost_.” The man said it as if it were an accusation. “Though I’m going to insist on a change of clothes before you do. Gimme a sec, I know I have a box of stuff somewhere...” 

 

 

 

_He stood before Odin Allfather and found it an oddly simple task to think of this person, who had once been just ‘father’_ , _in such removed terms._

_The chains that encircled his wrists and neck noisily echoed the unspoken sentiment the room seemed to have towards him, though he could not fault them for it. Still the throne room suffered from the frontward incursion that had happened only two days ago. The once-polished floors, still dusted with crushed stone and dimpled with various fissures, displayed one grand, spanning crack that ran up along the stairs to the Allfather’s throne—a sad, aching thing that, when stared at, made the air thin and dry._

_It had been Loki who’d done it._

_Loki, who had led the attack and had invaded Asgard._

_Loki who had gripped the scepter in his hand, who had turned friends against one another and broke open the doors he had once gladly walked and been welcomed through._

_Who had returned to a place he’d called home, but who’d no longer recognized its shining halls and brilliant spires._

_Instead, all he had seen was possession and prize, awash in the cooling blue that had soothed his fractured body and mind. A deep, rolling voice had called to him at the edges of space, threading around him and making him back into shape, as if by the motions of his mother’s loom, until finally, once more, he was Loki._

_Only not._

_But he could not tell the difference, not until Sif had attacked him with her shield. The first blow had been stark white, a sweet silence after constant sound, and then like the blooming of flora, true thoughts filtering in for the first time since he’d been found._

_The words, the suggestions, the Titan had given him suddenly became strict orders—demands. The solace and purpose he’d thought he’d found became hollow, empty, and then cold—frigid like the ruined remains of his birthplace and like the huge, lonely expanse of space and the places between._

_It was then that he realized what had happened, what was to happen, and as he recovered from the blow and frantically turned to Sif, frantically tried to summon his voice and form the words he needed to speak, the shieldmaiden cracked the edge of her shield into his face, again. This time, however, his world went black, and he had not woken from the sleep that followed for the entirety of the day and that night, only to wake in chains, surrounded by a gilded cell._

_And now he stood before the council, before the warriors and soldiers he’d fought, and the people he’d harmed. He stood before the Allfather, stern face lined with exhaustion, and the Allmother, fingers gripped tight in silent plea._

_He stood before the Warriors Three: Fandral—weary, Volstagg—concerned, and Hogun—grim. Sif remained impassive, arms crossed and lips turned down._

_And he stood before Thor, who looked conflicted. He appeared angry, furious, bottled with his frustration, but even worse—terribly, terribly happy, it seemed, that Loki stood before them at all._

_Loki himself couldn’t have named what it was he felt, or what he might’ve felt if he’d allow himself the luxury; instead, he gathered what will he could, which was not insubstantial despite Thanos’s best efforts, and focused it pointedly, strategically, elegantly into words that he was not altogether sure Asgard deserved from him, but that he would deliver regardless._

_The Allfather began._

_“Though I cannot take from you what has only ever been yours…” A breath was taken, and Loki noted, restlessly, how Frigga’s hands tightened. “I bind you, Loki, by the wings of Hescamar and by the heft of your crimes.” Gungnir was leveled at him, blade pointing accusingly at Loki’s chains. An all encompassing panic gripped him by the throat, though he remained still, face carefully blank.“Your sedir shall be, from this moment on, unreachable to you so long as those crimes be unredeemed.” Then, more softly. “And so long as you remain worthy of them.”_

_And then the Allfather spoke the ancient, knowing tongue that none but the Allfather knew, and as he spoke, Loki felt the fluttering touch of wings, the brush of feathers—and then it was gone. Half of himself became unreachable—folded like a letter, words hidden from sight. The loss was a gentle one, as if it were a simple misplacement._

_Loki staggered._

_Dread filled his belly. He felt the blood drain from his face, and terror lit him, for a moment, thinking that perhaps the glamor that paled his skin had fallen away, revealing the monster beneath. He looked down at his hands, relieved to find them as they ever were._

_Out of habit, out of bitter defense, Loki laughed, unhinged. “No standing on ceremony, then?” He could not right himself, could only stand crookedly. He tried smiling, to mock, but it felt awkward and strained. Oh, he should have prepared for something like this, of course he should have, but he had been blinded by the misplaced notion of home. He grinned, a showing of teeth. “How refreshing!” he spat._

_Hushed murmurs filled the room, though they were as waves on a faraway shore._

_“Now the trial shall begin,” the Allfather announced, brushing Loki’s words aside. “Loki, today you stand before Asgard and her people to be tried for your transgressions not but two days hence. You have returned not as a prince or as countryman, but as an invader—an enemy.” The Allfather seemed to gather his breath as he peered down, looking at, but not seeing, Loki with glazed eyes. “What say you? What reason may you give us for your actions, for the lives you have helped take and the trust you have forsaken?”_

_“I cannot—” and he choked on acidic words, norns be damned, of all the times for words to fail him, let it be not now! He started again, differently, though no less sharp. “What becomes of me, what I have become, is inconsequential. It was not I—”_

_“Inconsequential? You deem your actions less than reproachable?”_

_“No, I—”_

_“Then you acknowledge the crime you have committed?”_

_“The crime is not mine alone, I’ve come—”_

_“But it is!” Odin bellowed, anger unchecked. “Though you were not alone in this act, you alone were betrayer of brethren!”_

_“Oh?” Loki canted his head, his purpose shrouded in anger. “Of brethren? You say that with such conviction, Allfather. You say that with such surety, to one such as I. You who know best that I—”_

_“Silence! Before your own tongue cuts you, boy!” Frigga’s hand rested on the Allfather’s shoulder, eyes communicating something Loki cared not to study._

_He breathed hard, thinking of the words aplenty he’d spoken to the Allfather on the stair, when he’d lashed out before the Odinsleep. He remembered the curdling, serrated anger and the bitter, terrifying realization that the God of Lies had been fed the greatest lie of all, the very one that defined him, and worst of all, that he could no longer hide behind the lie and be comforted by its shade—the casket had already torn his guise asunder, and not even he could keep the truth at bay._

_He brought forth the feeling of betrayal that had fueled him, the numbing sense that his life had been nothing but pretense and strings, strings by which to control him when the Allfather thought need for Jotunheim’s lost heirloom. He kindled the loss, the turbulence of his ire and anguish, and the madness it left in its wake—he collected all of the feeling that might keep him from his purpose, that might distract and stagger him—he gathered it, pulled it together into the center of his palm, and crushed it._

_It would not do to choke or lose the words he needed for warning, rather than retribution. That could come later, if ever there was one._

_“Allfather,” he began again, words spoken tiredly and spread thin, “I have nothing to offer in way of recompense, nor am I fool enough to try.” For I am ever the disappointment, and no words could ever sway you otherwise, he thought. He breathed at the silence Odin granted him to fill. “But I say what becomes of me is inconsequential at this moment because I did not come to fulfill my own desires, but those of another. The Mad Titan, Thanos, intends to open a portal between here and the realm of Sanctuary.” Loki met Frigga’s eyes, eyes that seemed to reevaluate the gauntness of his figure and the shadows beneath his eyes, her expression lighting with sudden understanding and compassion._

_Loki narrowed his eyes. “There is something in Asgard’s vaults he wants very desperately.”_

_The crowd erupted in conversation, and while Thor gripped Mjonir and the Allfather considered what words Loki had given him, Frigga had the look of one who gripped the reigns in exultation of the hunt._

_“Loki,” Thor spoke. “Why do you warn us now if you so willingly aided the man you speak of?”_

_Though Loki was sure the scepter was being kept deep in Asgard’s treasury, at Thor’s words he felt the glacial, twisting pull of it._

_He looked to Thor.“Not so much man, Odinson, and not so willingly.”_

_Thor frowned, whether at the admission or the name, Loki knew not._

_“Brother…” Thor struggled. “By what—”_

_“Thor,” the Allfather silenced him with hard eyes. He turned back to Loki. “Tell us,” he said with a strange wistfulness to his voice, “why we should trust what you have said?”_

_Loki frowned in distaste at the recognizable glint in the old man’s eye. He was attempting to teach Loki a **lesson**. _

_He would not have the time for an answer, however. A whining, painful screech filled the air as the sky above them darkened to the faraway recesses of space, a glittering haze burning away what was left of the blue sky. Loki craned his neck up to watch as a portal, directed and powered from the newly resurrected Bifrost, opened to a distant array of ships lining themselves up, as did all else in the hall for one quiet, tremulous moment._

_Loki’s thoughts turned to the images of Death that Thanos had given him—a beautiful, gruesome figure amidst the cinders of the world tree, of Asgard bent and burning and its waters bobbing with the corpses of her people, before a hand was shaking him and the sounds of shouted commands and screams of panic washed over him. He realized he’d been staring at the sky, and looked down to find Thor gripping his arm, lips moving with muted words._

_“The plan worked splendidly, I suppose,” Loki murmured. He could not restrain the laughter that burst forth, head thrown back again as it overtook him, manic and wild._

_“Then it was not a warning,” Thor nearly growled._

_“Oh, it was,” Loki assured him, noting that nearly everyone had fled from the hall. He wondered at the lack of bite in his words, strangely comforted by the resigned calm that had settled upon him.“But it seems my words mean little, as always.”_

_Thor appeared unconvinced. “Do you fight with us then?”_

_“Hardly,” Loki scoffed. “But I do not fight for Thanos, so for the purposes of your question, yes. I do.”_

_“Brother—”_

_“Not I,” Loki quipped. “Now if you want to stand here rather than fight the army above us, then by all means.”_

_An uneasy truce against chitauri and skrull, Asgard’s forces valiantly challenging the odds for not one army, but two? And though the Mad Titan made no appearance, Loki felt him in each breath, an overwhelming ozone of power and madness. And to do battle without his sedir? Trying. Very, very trying._

_And then he’d found Char, scepter in hand glowing bright as he used it to wipe memory of brothership from gold-armored warriors. A chase, a scramble for power, Loki grasping for the scepter just as the Skrull blurred into the light of the Bifrost’s blinding light in an attempt to escape the battle, Thanos, and Loki._

_And then he fell._

Loki jerked awake, a breath skittering from his lips as he was greeted with the foreboding hue of dark red lighting. He gripped the blanket across his lap as he scanned his surroundings, remembering after a moment that he was with Stark beneath the sands of Midgard.

“Nightmare, huh?”

Loki looked over to find Stark sitting atop a desk, one leg brought up to support his metal arm as he worked on it with the other, a small tool in his hand buzzing with white-hot flame.

“Memory,” Loki muttered. “One in the same in this case, however.”

“You know, there’s a way to deal with that,” the man said. Cool blue lettering and diagrams were suspended in the air around him, one of them disappearing when Stark gently waved a hand across it.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Don’t sleep.”

Loki huffed, swinging his legs from the bed and rubbing a hand across his face. “Is that what you do, Stark? Run from sleep from fear of it?”

The man kept at his work without looking up and shrugged. “Hey, don’t knock it till you try it. Used to be hell of alot easier when there was still coffee, but adrenaline cocktails work just fine.”

Loki watched him. The man’s mouth was pulled into a tight line, and now that the vestiges of sleep had worn away, his eyes were sharp enough to note that Stark’s hair was matted to his forehead with sweat, a flinch recurring every few seconds as he adjusted the location of the tool on his arm.

Loki stood and approached the desk, keeping a fair distance. He peered over and found that the arm had been taken apart, a skeletal structure revealed beneath with wires and tubes like veins following the path of what would have otherwise been musculature. Delicate sparks flew around the places the tool touched. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“That sleazoid that nomed on my arm dented the armor plating and fucked up some of the circuitry.”

“The creatures from underground? I’ve come across them before, though it was far from here and I didn’t know them by such a name.” He paused. “They should not be here, nor in any realm. They come from the colder, darker parts of space. Typically only large quantities of terror and suffering draw them out.”

“Well, we’ve got plenty of that,” Stark muttered.

“Is that fluid supposed to be leaking?”

“ _No_.The damage cut into my sensory input, so I had to rip everything out and fix the chip that regulates it.” He carefully switched out tools and picked up a thumb-sized piece of technology, holding it up for Loki to see. “See this? Would have made a _fortune_ off this in the prosthetics business if I’d considered it before all…” He waved his hand. “ _This_. But, that was before I lost the arm, and even though I supplied to the military all sorts of stuff, I never came across the incentive to cook something like this up.” He frowned. “Well, I did. The idea for it actually didn’t start with me, it was supposed to be for someone else. A friend of a friend. He has an earlier version of the piece, but nothing so detailed as this newer model. I’d offer it to him, but…” He trailed off, turning back to his work. 

“But?” Loki inquired, watching raptly at the minute adjustments being made.

“We don’t exactly keep in touch anymore.”

Loki studied the extent of the machinery, specifically the fluttering movement of the fingers that delayed just slightly behind the rest of Stark’s twitching. “You made this yourself?” he asked. Stark hummed in assent. “There are engineers and brightsmiths where I come from, though I’ve never come across a...prosthetic you said?” Loki mused. “Magic is typically used to heal or adjust to injuries this extensive, though the details escape me. My own magic is unsuited for it. The closest I’ve seen to its like belong to the dwarves of Nidavellir, but even then their designs are not nearly so….smooth.” He paused, lips quirking at Stark’s boggled expression. “They are usually more geometric.”

“Okay, did you just say dwarves? As in...no, wait, you wouldn’t get that reference. We’re going to discuss this later, but first, was that a veiled compliment? You just called my arm pretty, didn’t you?”

Loki rolled his eyes.

“That wasn’t a no!” Stark laughed, though it was somewhat strained. “And magic, you said magic.”

“To repair damage to the body we use Soul Forges.” Loki watched, amused, as Stark made an impatient gesture for him to continue. “They’re used to focus and amplify sedir.”

“Fancy word for magic?”

“Essentially.” He mildly dragged his hand through a blue-lit design layout of Stark’s arm, the image adjusting as Loki tested out the interface and studied its components. “Interesting. What is it that you do here? Is there not a—”

Stark held up a finger. “Gimme a sec,” he said, distractedly.

A spark of irritation lit him until he realized tremors had begun to regularly shake Stark’s hand as he focused intently on another part of the arm. He considered offering respite, but the tight, suffocating embrace of the Allfather’s magic rankled him, and so he kept his silence.

Long minutes passed until the man sighed deeply in relief, tension released all at once as, finally, his brow unfurrowed. “Well that sucked,” he drawled, bringing up his arm and testing each finger. “I had to cut down most of the neural looping, but at least the motor skills aren’t lagging like my ping’s one-ninety-eight.” He looked at Loki. “You were saying?”

Half out of curiosity, half out of natural spite, he asked instead,“How did you lose your arm?”

Stark returned the barb with an amused huff. “How’d you lose your magic?” He raised a brow at Loki’s silence, twirling his tool. “Question for a question, Loptr. Don’t ask if you don’t wanna tell.”

“Touchy,” Loki hissed. “One would almost think you were evading the question.”

“And you aren’t?”

“What makes you think I lost it?”

“Easy. You mentioned having magic just now, but I haven’t seen a lick of it.”

“A lick?” he asked, puzzled for a moment before understanding washed over him. “Ah. Colloquialism. And what if I’ve merely refrained from using it?”

“Well, I guess, but, and, stop if I’m wrong, wouldn’t you have just used it to go back to wherever you came from by now?”

“Not wrong, exactly,” he murmured. “Are you finished here?” When Stark nodded, Loki held out his hand expectantly, waiting until the other man cautiously laid the skeletal inner structure of his wrist in it. The weight was strangely light—fragile, even. “And my magic is not lost. Just...limited,” he muttered, begrudgingly. With one last glance at the schematics of the arm, he summoned all the pieces that had been lain out on the table, allowing them to briefly hover over the correct spots before he secured them back in place. The look on Stark’s face was worth the embarrassing amount of exertion it took.

When he took his arm back, Stark whistled, though it seemed the man was less impressed with the magic and more impressed with the assembly. “Did you seriously just _peruse_ those schematics and gain a comprehensive understanding of it in all of, what, five minutes?” Looking up from the arm, Loki hummed.

“Yes?”

Stark’s eyes bore into him, narrowing. “Nothing,” he said after a time, posture suddenly guarded while he cast his eyes to a far wall. “Just, uh, surprising? I’m gonna go with surprising. Anyway, weren’t you asking me what I do here?” He pushed himself off the table one-handed, keeping the one he’d been working on close to his chest. “It’s _literally_ groundbreaking.”

“If that was wordplay, you’ll find that it falls short when one doesn’t understand the cultural jargon,” Loki drawled. “I assume you quite literally work with soil, then?”

Stark looked sideways at him, bemused, before motioning to follow him towards the stair. Their bare feet pattered softly against stone as they climbed all the way up to a third floor, sunlight streaming in from a partially missing roof. The room they entered was tall and circular, and inside were long rows of revolving cases filled with leafy, healthy-looking plants.

“What do you think is the biggest thing in short supply here on Earth?” Stark asked, aloof and academic, walking over to a cart filled with tubs of soil.

“Food, as you’ve said before,” Loki answered.

“Bingo.” He tapped a finger against one of the tubs, nodding his head towards the dirt inside. “Serviceable soil, to be specific. Most of it pretty much sucks for agriculture, and it only has so much turnover. Most days I’m trying to figure out how to work around that. Other days, I’m trying to fix it altogether. Then there’s clean water, which we can recycle, but if we can find more? Fantastic.” He took a breath. “There’s figuring out how to survive with an extremely delicate atmosphere, as well as a climate that can _literally_ burn you alive on particularly bad days—see that tarp up there? A solar fabric to cut down on flares so these don’t get fried. Then there’s storms that create the weirdest fucking land hurricanes that, frankly, are just mind-boggling. There’s also the weird multidimensional paraphysical phenomena that’s going and, well.” He made a hand gesture. “The list goes on.”

Midgard was as volatile as it seemed, then, and he was more than likely stranded without the knowledge of what became of the battle he’d left on Asgard’s steps. Now that the thought properly occurred to him, he realized that half of him felt strung tight with the urgency that not-knowing left in its wake, while the other half felt...relieved. He was unsure as to why, and rather than instead of lingering on it, he took a leaf between his fingers and examined the machine housing it. “But what about your power source? Is that not an issue?”

“Taken care of. Years ago I took an old design for clean, self-sustainable energy and made it realistically applicable to powering just about anything. That’s what keeps this place running, along with the remaining twenty-five cities.”

Loki looked up. “In all of Midgard?” With a grunt in affirmation from the other man, Loki looked up at the outline of the unforgiving sun, remembering the texture of the sand in his hands and the sad, spectral remains of the buildings he’d seen on the horizon. Bones and ash and relics, not unlike another realm he knew, though _it_ comprised of glaciers and frost rather than blood, sweat and sand. “How did it happen?” he asked.

Stark shrugged. “In a nutshell?” And then proceeded to explain, in some detail, how the had world ended.

 

 

 

There was an underpass not far from the bunker—a tunnel beneath a mountain cramped with abandoned, rusted cars and a tangled nest of brittle weeds and mildew. The walls leaked moisture, almost like they were sweating. Cool drops of water weeped from the ceiling sporadically, the sound of them hitting car hoods and roofs echoed drearily in the darkness, and made it perpetually smell like dirt after rain.  

Tony hated the place.

After giving Loki the abridged version of Earth’s more recent history, he’d not so much excused himself as abruptly darted down the staircase. He’d never had to explain it before, and talking about it was weirdly methodical, as if he went around explaining his biggest fuck-up every day. The ease of it itched, made him feel tense and irritable and utterly not okay with sharing breathing space with another human being. Or not human being, as the case may be.    

_An AI, intended to protect mankind, becoming sentient and deciding that the world would be better off without it,_ Tony thought dismally. _The cosmic powers that be must have one hell of a sense of humor. Deus ex machina, indeed. Pun totally fucking intended._

Tony’d explained what an AI was, though Loki seemed to understand the concept, and that the AI, program name: ULTRON, had easily outmaneuvered the security systems in place, tearing into them like it’d been a Thanksgiving dinner.

In hindsight, in foresight, and really in _all-sight_ , it had been avoidable. Tony had been spoiled by Jarvis, by his geniality. The entirety of his experience with AI had only been rewarding, so of course it’d seemed like a good idea at the time.

But then Jarvis had been coded based off the man himself, while Ultron had been...  

At first, when Ultron had fled SI’s systems, all he’d done was crash the internet in most major cities and piss off the general public. Tony hadn’t been too worried then, thought the problem was manageable, even got the rest of the Avengers to think he had it under control.

But then one week of digital interference became three months of hacking, mostly into SI servers, and then into government contracts. Ultron had made no contact with them, not until Jarvis pinpointed his access point and made an attempt to _ask_ the AI to stop what it was doing, only for Tony to be sent back Jarvis’ corrupted code and a eerily hilarious message saying, _I’m sorry, Anthony. I’m afraid I can’t do that._ Immediately after his personal hard drive had been wiped.

Clint had nearly popped a blood vessel before flipping his chair and leaving. Natasha...Natasha had squeezed his elbow, weirdly comforting and, honestly, Tony had been thankful for it in the face of Steve and Fury’s, well, fury. Bruce hadn’t even been there at the time. Jarvis, _thank god_ , had been backed up via Extremis, though Tony knew they’d played that one a little too close to the chest.

_One hell of a sense of humor_ , he thought again, though he had not explained his part in this to the fallen god. Just the general sum. Only what he needed to know to understand, and not in any detail. It wasn’t that Tony couldn’t fess up to it, it was just…

Come on, how did you say that you were the one that created the AI that destroyed the world, _and_   the weapons to do it?

Because after the mindgames, after nearly six months of radio silence that pulled their attention away from the rogue program, Ultron had targeted each Stark and SI-supported facility installed with Arc Reactor technology. And the number of facilities that housed them?

Hundreds. All around the world. 

The funny thing was, no one but Tony had ever really considered the destructive capabilities of the arc reactor before, and that had only been briefly, easily pushed aside because it was pretty damn hard to disrupt the magnetic field, and why would someone use it to destroy when it could _create_ _so much?_  

But Ultron was...god, introspection, no thanks, but—yeah. Tony wasn’t actually an idiot, which was what it would have taken not to notice the fantastic irony of the situation.

The new reactor tech was supposed to be utilized in the energy initiative Stark Industries had begun in major cities, prototypes like what he’d installed in New York meant to provide cities with renewable energy and, more recently, force field capabilities. Most of their contracts in experimental conditioning with the latter had begun in East Asia, though it hadn’t taken too long for other cities to warm up to the idea of protective city barriers. Twenty-five cities, to be exact.

Tony had laughed at it later—much, much later. If it hadn’t been for those systems in place, if he hadn’t been inspired by Dr. Selvig’s prototypes that Shield had confiscated and that Tony had hacked to find and thought, hey, energy shields that can deflect physical and kinetic force—if he hadn’t kept the blueprints on Extremis’ private server, protected by Jarvis and out of Ultron’s reach, then he never would have been able to activate the security measures that, literally, saved what little was left of the human race.

To be both the man who saved and ended the world…

Honestly, Tony would have been fine dying back in that cave. At least then he would have only be responsible for a couple of thousand deaths, rather than over six billion.

He ran a thumb along the seam of his arm and thought of long, pale fingers. He grumbled and leaned forward between his legs, hands brushing to the back of his head as thoughts rushed by, only to be categorized neatly by Extremis.

He blinked and accessed his servers, surveying the files he’d hacked from Shield from what felt like a lifetime ago. There’d been something strangely familiar about the mention of supposed norse gods and Einstein-Rosen Bridges, Loki’s words from in the car pulling at a thread of something half-remembered, something he could have swore he’d read about in some redacted government files collected by Fury’s own version of the MIB.

He almost didn’t notice when Jarvis began to assist him, following his train of thought and sifting through potential files that might lead back to any mention of gods and portals.

When Tony had woken from Extremis’ incubation stage, he’d felt—in a word?

In two?

Fucked sideways. Which, admittedly, really wasn’t a bad thing in most cases. Extremis was, in fact, not most cases.

He remembered pushing past the tough, crusted scabs of what had been imperfect skin and blood, and being greeted with the crushing overabundance of new stimuli and data bleeding across his consciousness. He’d gagged on it, the cybernetic interface crowding him into a corner and nearly sending him into a feedback loop.

And then Jarvis had proverbially, mercifully, stepped in and allowed himself to act as a buffer until Tony could make sense of the world again, though maybe not as he had known it.

Pepper had found him later, a half-filled tumbler in Tony’s hand as he contemplated the unchanged nature of the arc reactor in his chest. That potentiality had been expected, the regenerative capabilities nearly inconsequential due to the chaotic structure of the virus. Tony still healed at a higher rate than most, even ran at a higher temperature due to his altered metabolism and the ever-lingering fiery components that seemed entrenched in the core of Extremis, but his focus had been on the psycho-cybernetic applications.

Well, it worked.

And the reactor? Tony had been _relieved_. 

What did that even say about him? The fact that the scar tissue was so extensive around his heart, his chest, that Extremis couldn’t make it better, and yet he felt _comforted_ that nothing had changed? Frustrated as hell and not totally surprised, but relief?

Pep hadn’t been happy in the slightest, least of all that Tony had done it without the benefit of a healthy heart. _That_ had been the cause of half their arguments after the fact, but Tony never regretted it. Not with how it opened his eyes, and not with how it connected him to Jarvis, as if there’d been an extension of himself that he’d never known he’d been missing.

Though maybe he should, considering how things wound up. Too much metal and not enough man, Steve had said when the new AI went rogue. He would have known better than to create Ultron if he’d been any less of a machine.

_Pfft. Right._

Jarvis found what he was looking for first, an entire set of documents littered with the words like _portals_ , _aliens, Asgardians,_ and _potential gods_. Apparently some guy in a cape and his medieval friends tore up some place in sticks New Mexico, and—oh. Jane Foster. _Of course._

Tony mulled over the information before sending his thoughts towards Jarvis.

_How’s our resident god doing, J?_

_Currently, I can’t say, sir. He left several minutes after your departure._

Tony frowned. _Where—_

“Do you come here often?”

Tony startled, looking over his shoulder to find the god in question gazing up at the darkened sky.

“Adopting customary Earth pickup lines already. I’m so proud.” The god came to stand beside him, head tipped in inquiry.

When Tony explained, the god looked like he’d swallowed a bug.

“To answer your question though, no. Not really.” He leaned back on the car hood he was sitting on. “But you? You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” he asked. Loki looked like he was about object, so he clarified. “To Earth, I mean. Midgard.”

The god clasped his hands behind his back, their eyes meeting when he tilted his chin down. “Where do you think your stories come from?” he asked lightly, lilting tones matching the atmosphere of the evening.

Tony smirked. “And what’s their basis for comparison? ‘Cause I’m not judging, but I’m having a hard time picturing the goat and horse stories.”

And now the god looked like he’d swallowed two bugs. “My brother’s companions, unfortunately. They had a rather morbid fascination with telling tall tales, particularly ones that...left little to the imagination. They were not always fond of me.”

“I get the feeling that you were the smartass of the group.” The eye roll he got out of that was absurdly endearing. A cool drip from above hit his forehead and beaded down into his eye. He wiped it away, thought about asking if Loki’d been on Earth, say, fifteen years ago, but let the question drop.

“C’mon, this place sucks,” he said, rolling off the car. 

“It is not unlike a fish’s gullet,” Loki mused, looking back into the unseeable parts of the tunnel. “I’m surprised that the dark and cold here is not a home to more.”

He followed Loki’s gaze. “I never said it wasn’t.” That earned him a look. He shrugged. “I never actually checked it all the way down, but nothing’s attacked me yet.”

“Rather careless of you, don’t you think?”

“You’re more than welcome to take a look for yourself,” he said, trying for teasing and falling short, making him sound breathless.

“Don’t tell me, Stark,” the god said with a little smile, “that you’re afraid of the dark?”

Another drop of water fell on him, fell on Loki as well, and for a second Tony felt rope burn on his wrists and a jolt in his chest, and a quick inhalation. A reminder of breath.

“I’m not a fan of caves,” he said. He turned, suddenly pissed off, though not at the god himself. “I’m heading back to the workshop.” He was a dozen steps away when the sound of following feet trailed after him.

He almost didn’t hear Loki murmur to himself, “Then why do you linger in them?”

 

 

 

“You know…” Tony cleared his voice a while later, rough from silent concentration. The past twenty-four hours had been hell on his arm, but it wasn’t from any of the damage done at the mall. Finally, after giving up on a nap, he’d decided dive and see what was making his fingers spasm like fucking spider legs every time he reached for a wrench. “You know, I think I might know someone who could help you figure out a way back home.”

Loki paused in his conversation with Jarvis, swiveling in the chair Tony had cobbled together for him. His new housemate was mostly reserved, though he seemed genuinely delighted when Tony had introduced him to the AI.

The god seemed to be puzzled by something, and then he realized that to Loki, Tony had been staring at a wall for the better part of thirty minutes.

“Have you fixed the problem?” he asked.

Tony frowned. “How’d you know...?”

“I informed Mr. Liesmith of Sir’s troubles concerning his internal systems,” Jarvis intoned.

“But he’s not told me much else on the subject,” Loki hedged. “You will have to explain to me what exactly your ‘internal systems’ entails.”

“Yeah, sure, later,” he said and leaned forwards onto his knees. The sight of Loki’s bare toes, which was weirdly intimate, startled Tony for a second. He hadn’t realized the guy had rolled close enough to touch.

“Are you well?”

“Peachy,” Tony quipped. “Now back to my brilliant revelation.”

Loki looked doubtful. “I didn’t think there were any magic users on Midgard.” During his and Jarvis’ discussion, with Tony intermittently joining in, Loki had described the ‘realms’ he’d visited, though he lingered mostly on Asgard. Tony didn’t think he realized his tone turned soft, somewhat strained when he spoke of it. Tony didn’t ask, though. He could recognize unresolved issues when he saw them.

“There aren’t. Not any I know of, anyway.” And wasn’t that a thought? “I’m talking about a scientist. If there was anyone here that would know anything about wormhole jumping, it would be her.” He tapped on his knee, still kind of boggled by the idea of Loki’s toes. “I don’t have any direct access to her, she doesn’t do digital contact anymore. So we’d have to go into the…city.”

“Are you such a recluse that the idea frightens you?”

“I am _not_ a recluse.” God damnit yes he was. “There are some very good reasons why I fly solo.”

“Such as martyrdom, sir?” Jarvis offered primly.

Tony frowned at the ceiling.

“That’s a rather petulant look,” the god told him, hand cupping his face.

“Look, do you want help getting back home or what?” There was no immediate answer for that, though the god’s face was pretty much answer enough. “I’m gonna take that as a yes.”

 

 

 

“These guys are such a pain in the ass.”

In the distance, though not quite far enough to exactly be described as comfortable, they watched as giant creatures leapt up from the sand in a flurry of swirling dust. They made no noise other than the great reverberation of their landings, though the undulating movement of their fins cut through the air and created a piercing whistle not unlike a wailing wind.

Stark relinquished his grip on the steering wheel and pressed his face into it instead, a long and irritated sound gurgling from deep in his throat.

Loki rolled his eyes and pulled the lever to open the car door.

“What’re you doin’?” Stark asked without looking up. The words came out muffled and without inflection.

“If we have to wait for these things—”

“Sand mantas.” Stark grinned, probably because he’d figured out that Loki hated being interrupted, but it was the first sight of humor he’d seen since they’d begun the trip towards the city. The man had been irritable and crass to the point that Loki’d considered stealing the car and leaving him behind to suffer.  

Instead of continuing, Loki slammed the door closed and pulled the shawl he’d borrowed from Stark over his head. A large, broken structure loomed off to the side of them. The remains of a bridge, perhaps.

“No, seriously, what are you doing?” Stark rounded the front of the car, his own hood shading his face. “It’s hot out here.”

“It’s hot in _there_ ,” Loki snapped. “The sun is setting regardless. It will be cooler out here than it is in that wretched machine.”

“You’re just pissy because I wouldn’t let you drive.” Stark chuckled and sat on the hood of the car, bringing a leg up and tapping his knee. The sand mantas continued to flail in the air, landing in sprays of sand. They blocked the way over a series of miles, a spanning wall of silent behemoths, and made it impossible to continue until they were gone.

Loki already felt flushed, a sweltering sting beneath his skin making him flinch. He hid it in a step he took forward, and decided to pace while he, for the first time, considered the second skin he felt beneath the one he saw, the one he dreaded, the one that had burned through his Aesir guise the moment he’d been impaled while Stark had wrangled with the—the _sleazoid_ back beneath the sand. The moment he’d felt the Jotun chill, seen the frost collect at his boots, he’d fled.  

He was pulled from this thought when Stark asked flippantly, “You have cities in Asgard? Or wherever. You never did tell me where you’re from. I just assumed with the name and all.”

“Of course.” Loki crossed his arms. “What did you imagine?”

“Not sure. That’s why I was asking. By the way, was that a confirmation? Is Asgard where you kick it up?”

Loki gave him a look. “Midgardian slang is ridiculous.”

“You thinking Jarvis is a ghost is ridiculous.”

“Isn’t he?” Loki countered. “A soul without a body? What would you name him?”

“I’m not really a big believer in souls.” He rolled his eyes. “But I see what you’re saying. You two seemed to get along like a house on fire. It was adorable.”

“If you mean that I enjoyed our conversation, yes I did. His construct is fascinating, and he said that you were his creator?” When Tony nodded, Loki gave him a sly look. “Not bad, for a mortal.”

"I'll try to take that as a compliment." He paused, and then commented casually. “I can’t tell if I like you or not.”

Loki’s lips twitched. “The feeling is mutual.”

They both watched the creatures in the distance. Though the sun _would_ be setting soon, the heat was already becoming unbearable. The clothes he wore felt chafing against his sweat-slicked skin. Loki decided to sit against the front wheel, in a patch of shade. Out the corner of his eye, he caught Stark laying back against the glass, shifting to get comfortable. “One giant fucking desert,” he muttered, pulling his hood to cover his eyes.

Loki had to agree, and in explicit in Midgardian terms.  One giant _fucking_ desert.

 

 

 

Tony jerked the transmission into park. The shade of the hangar they were under was supposed to keep car tech from frying, but the temp outside read disgustingly high.

Tony snorted.

They could have at least installed fans or something.

The open-air market they were at made up one of only two big Terminals between Chicago and New York, tents and some more permanent shelters creating several streets worth of vendors and trade exchanges. Crowds milled around, mostly smugglers and scavengers, people interested in old stuff that was still intact. There were garages for vehicle mods, restoration specialists, some blackmarket stuff like rare ingredients or cuisine, and lots and lots of backyard tech that had yet to be licensed.   

Essentially, it was one giant, illegal fleamarket. They were still eight hours away from New York, but even with all the mods he’d done to the car, it still overheated. He figured it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to take a break anyway, maybe get some real food from one of the places here.

Only he forgot what the crowds were like in these places. Fuck.

Loki followed quietly behind him as they walked alongside the flow of traffic, seemingly unaffected by the overwhelming noise and bustle. A shitty used parts display caught Tony’s eye. He brought them up to it, picking up a hopeless climate control system and half-pretending to consider it.

“Okay, so look.” He glanced at Loki from the corner of his eye, dressed in Tony’s extra coat and a shawl that slung across his shoulders.

“We gotta wait until it gets dark out to go into the city. So until then, we’re killing time out here in this junk yard. By the way, you should really cover up.” He made a motion and Loki rolled his eyes, pulling the shawl up over his head. He looked like he was considering Tony, whose face was hidden behind a cowl and hood, eyes covered by goggles—and then he smirked.

“Why Stark, we wouldn’t happen to be _hiding_ from anyone, would we?” 

Tony winced. “...No, not exactly. It’d probably be better if you didn’t mention my name, though.” A promising-looking laser pen stood out near stacks of gaskets and blackboxes.

“Then by what name should I call you?”

“Just...god, just use Anthony. Nobody will think twice about that.” He threw the car part back down on the table, the shop owner glaring daggers at him but Tony just waved him off.  Loki’s amused huff had him looking sourly ahead. “Look, I’m not a criminal or anything.”

“I never insinuated that you were.”

“Yeah, but you’re giving me this nagging look like I just shoplifted from a toy store.”

Loki sidled alongside him, tapping at the pocket the pen had been slipped into.

Tony shrugged. “It was overpriced.”

They spent a few hours trolling the streets, Tony getting sucked into haggling and pushing his wares into Loki’s unsuspecting arms, grumbling for him to hang onto them.

Loki had given the items a cursory inspection, looking somewhere between disgruntled and bemused. When Tony went to give him something else, Loki made a gesture for him to wait. “I wonder…” he murmured.

He looked like he was concentrating on something, though Tony couldn’t tell what. His brows furrowed and his shoulders hunched, but then all the items, the one in his hand included, disappeared. Tony started, shocked, and looked up to Loki’s pinched expression. “Pocket realm,” Loki explained, seemingly pleased despite his shortness of breath. “One I still have access to, it seems.”

Tony couldn’t decide whether to be worried about getting his things back or thankful that they were tucked away. “How?” he asked. “I thought your proverbial genie was stuck in the bottle.”

“It is not unlike trying to drink the sea through a straw,” he rasped. “In this case, to continue with the metaphor, only a draught was needed.”

“You have anything useful tucked away in there?”

“If you mean to ask if I have the means to a way back—no. Only trinkets.”

Tony shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

There was a tent he’d visited a few times before that had a good reputation for not asking a lot of questions, so he had them stop by and sold a few programs, tentatively accessing his servers through Extremis and nearly sighing with relief when it gave him no trouble. The woman he’d sold them to raised a brow when he didn’t take out some sort of communicator to complete the exchange.

“Nice trick,” she noted, tapping at the newly listed programs on her screen. “The coding on these programs is pretty nice too. All the stuff you’ve sold me goes fast. People love it.”

“ _Shit!”_ a young voice screeched from the back that served as a garage. The sounds of a toolbox being flipped and something hissing made several other look towards the back as well.

The woman placed her communicator on the desk behind her and held up a finger. “Give me just one sec,” she told him with a sugary smile before snarling in the other direction. “ _Danielle!_ I _told you_ not to mess with that piece of shit car!”

The woman marched past the beads that cascaded down from the top of the garage door, which Tony would have commented on if he hadn’t turned to find that the god had wandered away from his elbow. Instead he stood across the shop, studying a TV playing the city’s news report.

Tony leaned his hip against the desk and crossed his arms, tapping a beat with his fingers and snickering when he heard absurdly graphic threats being tossed between the two women in the back.

“They at it again, huh?” a big guy said as he walked through the entrance with a satchel, seemingly more to himself than to Tony.

“Yeah. Smells like someone burned through a few valves.” The smell of an oil fire was becoming vaguely worrisome.

The man met Tony’s eyes, or his shades, at the very least. “Did Jess finish helping you out?” he asked.

Tony pointed at the communicator. “Just waiting to break bank.”

“Well, you ain’t breakin’ much,” he said, taking the comm in hand. “I can help you break somethin’ though.” Then he paused, smiling. “Hey, you’re the guy that did that music software, aren’t you?”

Tony smirked under his cowl, shrugging.

“Man, Jess said you sold that to us for dirt cheap. We’ve been giving that program away like _candy_.”

Tony hummed in agreement. “It’s bad enough that more than half of the world’s musical history was wiped, never mind the gross rarity of instruments. New music for the new age, right?”

The guy scoffed. “I hear you on that one. I’d been listening to reruns of Run-DMC’s Raising Hell before you came to us with that gem. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a classic, and I love me some Jam Master Jay, but the eighties can’t last forever.” The guy offered his hand. “I’m Luke, by the way. Luke Cage. Jess is my wife.”

Tony took the man’s hand. “And the fire-starter in the back?”

The man grinned. “My daughter. She has her sights set on becoming a grease-monkey, modding cars for those stupid fucking races they waste time and money on.” He tapped at the screen in his hand a few times. “She’s only got her hands on old scrappers though, at least until she _doesn’t_ set fires to them.” Luke sighed. “And I don’t know shit about cars, so when that happens is up in the air. And,” a crashed and bang from the back made several people to his left jump, “Jess doesn’t exactly have a delicate touch.”

Tony snorted. “You don’t say.”

“The creds should be showing up on your account by now.” His brows furrowed. “You know, a friend of mine was telling me the other day that your code looked familiar.”

“Hm?” Tony hummed, checking his account. He took a casual step back.

“Yeah. Said it looked like the city’s systems.”

“I’d take that as a compliment if it weren’t for the fact that SI wasn’t ancient.” Tony shifted and tried not to tense, looking for the words that could end what had been a nice conversation.

“Pardon.” Tony nearly sighed in relief at Loki’s voice. “I was wondering if you might explain to me why the prices differ from two of the same items?”

“Sure,” Luke answered, shoving the comm under his arm. “Thanks for the tech, again,” Luke told Tony, though it sort of sounded like a double entendre. He followed Loki across the room, and before anyone else wrangled him into conversation, he slid back out the tent and waited across the street for Loki.

He wondered, idly, if the god had divine intuition, remembering how he’d sensed the Brood approaching back at the hotel somehow. He’d have to ask him, after he bought him a drink. 

Later, when they were sitting in a bar and after Tony had bought them both drinks, Loki jostled the ice in his glass and murmured, “Mortals are strangely resilient.”

Tony tapped the bar for a refill. “And whatever you are isn’t?”

The glass tumbler shattered in Loki’s grip, shards spilling across the bar, ice cubes twirling along the wood.

The only thing that kept Tony from jumping out of his seat and walking straight out the door, away from all the sudden eyes on them, was the look on Loki’s face.

Instead, he waved away the barkeep, brushing the glass aside while Loki stared blankly at his unmarked hand. He waited until the heads that’d turned swiveled back around before whispering tersely. “Hey, wanna _not_ draw attention to us? What was that about?”

“You’ve experienced loss.” Loki brought up a boot to Tony’s chair, turning to him. “A loss of self, yes? A loss of who you were.”

“Yeah, a couple of times. It’s kind of a bitter pill.”

Loki leaned forward, so close that Tony could feel his breath on his neck. “And how did you survive it?”

Loki’s eyes really were an alarming shade of poison green, and Tony wondered if there wasn’t a little magic in them. He shivered despite the heat. “Reconstruction. Redefinition. Rebirth? You change and be something new, or you die with your old self.” He suddenly felt old. He was sort of old, wasn’t he? Forty-three, _god._

Tony caught the new glass as it was slid down to them, the bartender seemingly unworried about the outburst. Tony waved in thanks, relieved when the guy nodded and went about his business. He turned back to Loki, the other man staring fiercely into Tony’s face. 

“But what if at the very core of yourself, there’s a monster?” he pressed. “What then?”

Tony brought the glass to his lips. “By whose definition? A monster is what you make it.” He sipped. “Personally, I say embrace it, turn it into what you want it to be. Otherwise you’re stuck playing a role, and the thing about roles? They’re static.” He set the glass down. “You wanna stay alive, do things? You gotta change. Playing a role will only get you so far.”

Loki’s head dipped as he gestured with his hands. “Yes, but what if the roles you play are just facets of your true self? An unchanging part that you are cursed with throughout your life, influencing all else?”

“I don’t think it works like that.” He looked around. It wasn’t crowded, and the nearest person was two bar stools away. He looked back to Loki. “Look, I’ve been called a lot of things over the years,” he said in a softer voice. “Some big ones? My dad’s son, Merchant of Death, Iron Man, Godkiller.” The last one brought him a scrutinizing look. “I was stuck in my father’s shadow for half my life, and then he died, which, yeah, even after that I still caught a fair amount of shade. Took about a decade for anyone to look at me without seeing _him_. Redefined my own name, made it _more_. Then, after a while,I realized the name was, to use your words, a ‘curse’, so I tried to be better, to fix it. And I did. When I was Iron Man, I thought I was the sum of what I could be, the _best_ of what I could be.”

He played with the hem of his pants, twirling a loose thread around his finger until it began to swivel a little too much. He fisted his metal hand, not wanting to mistake the tremors for nerves. “And even at my best I made mistakes, but I still wasn’t the same person I was before. I learned.” The memory of Yinsen bleeding over a rations supply came unbidden. Tony closed his eyes. “Experiences change people.” He rubbed his face, feeling worn. “Believe me, monsters are what you make them.”

Loki leaned back, eyes calculating. “And where are your monsters now?”

Hopefully only at the other end of the glass in his hand, but that question wasn’t getting answered. He knocked back the rest of his drink, placing both hands on the bar and pushing away. “Whatever you are?” he said instead. “You’re not a monster.” He stood, looking in the direction of the door when he noticed three sets of eyes on them.

Two women sat at a table near the door, a man with spindly limbs sitting between them, face turned down while he cleaned his glasses on the end of his shirt. The woman on his left had a shaved and tattooed head, looking like she could spit bullets. The other woman, more of a teenager really, was slimmer, thin fingers brought up to her cheek in silent fascination, her skin sallow and gaunt against the red of the jacket she wore. And, Tony noted, she wasn’t just looking in their general direction.

She was looking straight at Loki.

He squinted, running an echo scan on them and frowning when it came back blank. Faces whizzed across his interface, but zero initial matches applied to the three people sitting across the bar.

There weren’t a lot of people with security walls like that. “Take what you are and sell it,” Tony continued absently. “Sell it loud and sell it proud.”

“As you do?” Loki asked shrewdly.

“I’m a special case,” he muttered, formulating a segway that would get them out of the immediate vicinity because _why the actual fuck was that girl staring at Loki like that?_

Almost as if she’d heard him, the girl looked up at Tony and smiled, just as the echo pinged him an image of her alongside a very, very redacted file with one tiny word that made him grip the bar’s edge.

Suddenly Loki was chest to chest with him, and Tony’s brain sputtered for only a moment before he was bringing up his metal arm behind Loki’s head to deflect a bullet that had probably been intended for his face. He chanced a look over his shoulder to see that the reason Loki was pressed up against him was because, currently, he was gripping the wrist of a hand poised to plunge a rather sick-looking knife into Tony’s back. The hand belonged to— _god damnit_ , they were mutants. It was the slim guy that had been cleaning his glasses, smiling politely as if he _wasn’t_ caught halfway across from where he’d just been and in mid-assassination attempt, dark whorls beating beneath the skin around his yellowed eyes.

The guy pushed forward, swung out with his other arm only for Loki to grip that one as well. Tony and Loki’s faces were very close when the god turned to look back at the woman with the tattoos—the one who’d shot at them. “Stark?” he whispered. He didn’t even sound the least bit winded. It made Tony want to hit him.

“Wanna tango?” he proposed instead. He didn’t wait for an answer. He ducked underneath Loki’s arms, focusing on the guns he saw being lifted and aimed at him by Tank Girl over there, distantly noting that the rest of the bar had gone silent, though no one was getting up to leave.

Tony brought up his metal hand, repulsor ready.

“Just what the hell do you think you’re doin’?” a gruff voice barked from behind the bar. A spray of shots came at him, but halted in mid-air as the voice snarled, _“Not in my bar you don’t.”_

Tony eyed the bullets, because sooner or later they were going to go _somewhere_ , and nodded his head at the barkeep in thanks, who was also apparently a mutant. Fuck.

The younger girl, who’d stayed seated the entire time, waved a hand. “We didn’t mean to disturb business,” she said pleasantly, words thick with accent. Her voice was deeper than he’e expected. “Only, I figured no one would mind so much if I killed that man,” she told him, pointing at Tony.

“That’s pretty harsh, _devotshka_ ,” Tony said, smirking when her eyebrows rose.

“Well I do,” the barkeep grunted. “My bar, my rules. You’re not killin’ anyone.”

The other woman groaned, hitching her guns to her hips. “Not even if it’s Tony Stark?” she intoned.

Tony flinched, couldn’t help it. The remaining patrons in the bar began murmuring, none of their comments pleasant. He looked back at Loki, who had the other guy’s face smashed into the floor and held there by a hand fisted in his hair and pinned by a boot on his back.

A pregnant pause. Then, the barkeep coughed. “Fine, but no guns.”

Tony laughed, a little bitterly.“Ouch.” The barkeep shrugged, letting the bullets clatter to the floor. The woman holstered her guns and waited while the girl finally stood and approached Tony. He raised his palm, not registering whatever it was Loki was hissing at him, only for the girl to move, erratically, like a skipped tape.

Loki yelled. Tony shot. And then he felt a heady, laden haze—a flash of red—and then he was falling, the girl’s file shuddering closed as his sight dimmed, the word he’d spotted earlier pressing into him as if they were being seared in his skull.

_Hydra._

 

Sometimes Tony has this dream.

More often than not it’s nightmares, which was why he avoided sleep, had avoiding it down to a T, just like he’d told Loki. Nightmares where hands gripped his hair, shoving his face down into dark, putrid water in a rusted trough, the acrid taste of piss on the back of his tongue, down his throat. The need to breathe tightens in his chest to a searing pinpoint of a star, a jolt fries his nerves, and then he tastes blood, sweat and sand.

He finds himself being buried in the desert, his throat choked with heat, teeth crunching grit, and Yinsen’s voice is muffled, beckoning, and he’s reaching, he still can’t _breathe_ , but he’s _reaching_ —and then his hand is in the reactor’s terminal, the manual override in his hand, and _Christ_ his arm is tearing, burning from the overheated suspension. He wants to let go, he knows what’ll happen if he doesn’t, what will probably happen anyway, but he _can’t_. He can’t because it was his damn fault to begin with, and he has to do this, if there’s one god damned thing in his life he has to do, he _has_ to—

So yeah, nightmares. Mostly.

But sometimes, after he’s gone on another two or three day red-eye and finally, inevitably, nods off, he’s not in the caves or on the terminal floor, grasping what’s left of his arm and Extremis, inexplicably, doing nothing. Better yet, he’s not in the worst of his dreams, where he’s on the couch, ears ringing and Obie’s hand gently pressing him down. Instead, he’s somewhere he knows he hasn’t been before, that doesn’t have clear definitions but kind of reminds him of an aquarium—standing in front of a tank, the strange sentiment of something huge being just on the other side of the glass.  

There’s a holo of data, mathematical symbols mixed in with alien letters that he’s subconsciously familiar with, twirled together in swirling fractals that shiver like images on moving water. It’s an equation, he knows that in the first six seconds he looks at it, so he moves around components, glad for the absence of memory despite the disconcerting lack of sound and the magnitude of open space.

And the fact that he has no idea what this is or what the hell he’s doing.

The second time he has the dream, he realizes that the pieces have been jumbled, like someone shook the bag of scrabble pieces while he wasn’t looking. He’s a little bit frustrated that he’ll have to start over, until he realizes that they’re _still_ moving. After that it’s like a game of battleship—whoever can guess the pieces in the right order first, wins the game. He knows when he gets a sequence right because he feels it, like the resounding alignment of the arc reactor clicking into place.

He can’t say he _dislikes_ the dream. It’s certainly better than the nightmares. It’s just…

What was moving the other pieces?     

 

 

 

“Rise and shine, tinman.”

Tony groaned, his head throbbing like the hangover he wished he had. Because alcohol in quantity? Wasn’t a thing anymore. “Wha?” he slurred, squinting up at a dark, night sky, a face coming into focus.

That’s not right.

“Clint?”

“She didn’t scramble your brains too much, at least. C’mon, get off the ground.” Hands hefted him into a sitting position, his vision twisting and pocked with error alerts. The last time he’d felt like this, he’d bluescreened.

When everything settled, he noticed that Natasha was kneeled beside him, hair longer than he remembered and pulled high and tight against her head.

He stared at them for a long time.

“I take it back,” Clint said. “I think he’s broken.”

“What are you guys doing here?” Tony rubbed his face, freezing. “Wait, where’s Loki?”

“Loki?” Nat questioned, her voice sending a shiver up Tony’s spine.

“Yeah, tall, dark hair, legs that go for miles. He was…” Finally he looked around. “Where am I?”

“Terminal waste side,” Clint quipped. “Saw some guys dumping you here and thought one man’s trash is another’s, what would you call it, Nat?”

“Informational resource.” She smiled, tight-lipped.

“Your friend got whammied by that little girl’s mojo too,” Clint explained, holding out a hand. Tony looked at it, a feeling twisting in his gut as he shyly lifted his own to take it. Before their fingers could touch, the gears in his wrist began to whir and twitch without his intent. His fingers flinched back.

He didn’t take the hand. Instead, he wobbled to his feet on his own, clutching at his wrist. This glitch was seriously getting out of hand, no pun intended.

Clint raised a brow but didn’t comment.

He thought about asking, again, what they were doing here, but the dots connected as soon as the girl’s file popped back up in front of him.

“So you’re here for Hydra, then.”

Natasha nodded. “They’ve been tracking an energy signature that originated west of here. Dr. Foster informed us that—”

“Is your boy really a god?” Clint butted in.

“Depends on your definition.” Tony sighed. “So are you saying Hydra’s got him? Because that...that’s really not good.”

Natasha’s lips twitched. “Understatement.”

Clint jabbed a finger at him, grinning.“Which is where _you_ come in.” 


End file.
